Overview
- James Austin Johnson opened the Dec. 20 Saturday Night Live with a holiday address as President Trump.
- The bit introduced a White House “Patriot Games” for elite high school athletes, framed as a send-up of a Hunger Games–style spectacle.
- The script leaned into Epstein-file references, including redaction jokes and a line riffing on “Things a Pedophile Might Do.”
- Johnson’s Trump touted renaming the Kennedy Center after himself and floated rebranding other monuments like the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument.
- Visual gags included hugging a Christmas tree and a tongue-in-cheek nativity setup, and SNL shared the full cold open online shortly after it aired.